Don’t drink the whine; the festive fixture list is no slog

This is that time of year when, as the cliche has it, ‘games come thick and fast’. Even though this is not actually true.

What?

You’re an idiot Nicholson, you have clearly put LSD in your eggnog; of course they do, everyone says it, so it must be true. They can’t all be wrong and you can’t be right. To which I say, sorry, but just look at the actual fixture list. Those who will inevitably try and tell us how overworked players are in the coming three weeks of the festive fixture list are overstating the case markedly.

The truth is that across the best part of three weeks, top-flight players will enjoy what we could easily call A Winter Break. Two of them, in fact. Typically of five to seven days each.

The 14 Premier League clubs not playing in the League Cup have currently been having from the weekend until Boxing Day or December 27 off. There’s their first winter break and don’t forget it comes with as much gym work, physiotherapy and hot soap rub-downs by a firm-handed gentleman as you feel you might need. All free of charge. And on full pay. Eee, it’s a hard life, eh.

However, when they resume on December 26/27, that’s when they have to do some actual work. Most will be playing a couple of games in three days and three games in seven or eight. But then, they’ve already had a week off to build up reserves of superhuman strength, so I’m sure they’ll manage to drag their withered bodies through the hard graft required

Those three games are done by early in the New Year and then it’s feet up for another five to seven days before the FA Cup third round. At which point many first-team players will get the weekend off.

In other words, most top-flight clubs will be playing three games in 15 or more days. Yes, they’re quite close together, but come with a nice rest either side. So when we hear the moans and groans about the congested fixture list – and you know we will – let’s just keep a little bit of perspective. It’s not doing nothing, but it’s not the long hard slog too often portrayed, especially when you’ve got a big squad of players to draw upon.

After all, if having a huge squad is for anything it is for just such occasions. So, if a whiney manager starts moaning about the demands on his players but still fields all his best talent regardless, let us dismiss their complaints as so much festive entitlement and exceptionalism. After all, how much less football would they like to play? Two games, maybe or just one? Or is playing football just too arduous and potentially dangerous to do it at all?

There’s been a narrative established by the game itself since the start of this stunted season that there are too many games to play in too short a time, leading to an injury crisis and that most tired of Premier League conditions, ‘tiredness’.

This has led some of the more hysterical observers to grip their weeping eyes and declare ‘will no-one think of player welfare’? Seemingly mistaking playing football for fighting a war, or indeed, being a frontline nurse in a hospital, or someone who has to empty the bins.

While no-one would claim that playing football every few days is as hard on the body as not playing football every few days, if you’re a young man, honed to be a very fit athlete, trained for precisely this job, it is hardly a human rights crime to play about four-and-a-half hours of football across nearly three weeks, and I’m sure players not only know that, but are embarrassed by management and media going on about their stressful workload. Not only does it make them look weak but they know many people work bloody hard over the festive period for little money and they know they’re not them.

Playing three or even four games in two-and-a-half weeks is hardly out of the ordinary in any season, especially not for clubs which have European fixtures to fulfil. So games are not coming any thicker and faster than they normally are. Even at the busiest period, it is only one additional game compared to normal.

So, let’s have none of this ‘thick and fast’ business, unless we’re talking about player, manager and executives’ wages. Now they really do come thick and fast, and not just over Christmas and New Year.

John Nicholson